Add Spark to Your Writing With These 3 Simple Tweaks

Clarity is the most important quality of good writing. Writers should master it before anything else.

But, if that’s all your writing is–clear, concise, direct, and to-the-point–it can become stale and boring, causing your readers to lose interest.

Fortunately, there are some easy ways to inject life into your writing. By making some tweaks to your prose, you can significantly enhance your style, while retaining the vital clarity that good writing demands.

The tweaks I’m speaking of are modifiers, and I first learned about them by reading Joseph Williams’ book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, in which the University of Chicago English professor shares tons of advice that will dramatically improve your writing style.

I read the book for a college prose writing course and the ideas on modifiers are the ones I’ve most taken to heart, the ones that may have most benefited my writing. Williams advocates three types of modifiers:

Resumptive Modifiers

Summative Modifiers

Free Modifiers

Let’s look at each one, with examples of how to use them.

Resumptive Modifiers

Williams says, “To create a resumptive modifier, repeat a key word close to the end of a clause and then resume the line of thought with a relative clause, elaborating on what went before.”

Essentially, this means repeating the key word for emphasis.

Original version:

He finally faced his biggest fear that had plagued him since he joined the team.

Resumptive modifier version:

He finally faced his biggest fear, a fear that had plagued him since he joined the team.

Original version:

The restaurant serves excellent sushi that bursts with flavor.

Resumptive modifier version:

The restaurant serves excellent sushi, sushi that bursts with flavor.

By using commas and repeating words, you can give some rhythm to your sentences, letting your readers take it all in more smoothly.

Summative Modifiers

Williams says, “With a summative modifier, you end a segment of a sentence with a comma, then sum up in a noun or noun phrase what you have just said, and then continue with a relative clause.”

Original version:

He finally faced his biggest fear that had plagued him since he joined the team.

Summative modifier version:

He finally faced his biggest fear, a debilitating obstacle that had plagued him since he joined the team.

Original version:

The restaurant serves excellent sushi that bursts with flavor.

Summative modifier version:

The restaurant serves excellent sushi, a house specialty that bursts with flavor.

The summative modifier is similar to the resumptive modifier, but it allows you to be more descriptive.

Free Modifiers

Williams explains the free modifier: “This modifier follows the verb but comments on its subject. It usually makes more specific what you assert in the preceding clause that you attach it to.”

Original version:

He finally faced his biggest fear that had plagued him since he joined the team. This gave him newfound confidence and enabled him to take top honors.

Free modifier version:

He finally faced his biggest fear that had plagued him since he joined the team, eventually developing newfound confidence and taking top honors.

Original version:

The restaurant, which serves excellent sushi, provides flavor you can’t get anywhere else and makes you want to come back for more.

Free modifier version:

The restaurant serves excellent sushi, providing flavor you can’t get anywhere else and making you want to come back for more.

Using Them All Together

Be wise about how you do this–doing it just enough to imbue life into your writing–but sometimes you can mix and match these and really ramp up your writing.

Original version:

He finally faced his biggest fear that had plagued him since he joined the team. This gave him newfound confidence and enabled him to take top honors.

Combined modifier version:

He finally faced his biggest fear (a debilitating obstacle that had plagued him since he joined the team), developing newfound confidence and taking top honors.

Original version:

The restaurant serves excellent sushi and provides flavor you can’t get anywhere else. It makes you want to come back for more.

Combined modifier version:

The restaurant serves excellent sushi, a house specialty bursting with flavor, a flavor so unique it makes you want to come back for more.

Again, be sparing when you start combining these types of modifiers, as they can sometimes create very long sentences, confusing your readers.

But, certainly, use each of these modifiers by themselves with regularity, as they can add life, rhythm, and flow to your writing, breaking up the monotony of all those simple, clear, and direct sentences we’re always advocating, sentences that can dull down your writing if you let them.

Reader Comments (55)

This is very great advice. Being someone that has mainly written in an academic style it is difficult to get out of that particular way of writing.

The use of repeated modifiers in particular never really occurred to me. The other modifiers (such as summative and free ones) I have already been using. Glad that you wrote a blog article on this subject.

I’ve been looking for various ways to make my writing a little bit more interesting. I haven’t taken anything involving academically since a college technical communications course.

The course was good, but it focused on technical writing, which is documentation of solutions, reports, and manuals. It doesn’t help me much in my effort to write quality content, content that makes the reader want to come back for more. (see what I did there, aren’t I awesome?)

Great advice. I’ve read too many blogs that play it safe and go too far with the “keep it simple” content advice that some give. Keeping it simple does not mean to keep it uninteresting. Thanks for this post Jesse.

Yeah, I actually agree. The combined modifiers examples weren’t the greatest, but it was more about experimentation, experimenting with different ways of putting together two direct, yet somewhat bland sentences.

It’s certainly possible to create some elegant sentences by combining the modifiers; it just takes some effort. However, the tendency for those types of sentences to become long and thick, as you mention, is always there–use them sparingly, but when you get it to work well, it can really work well. Use caution.

@James and Roberta

I like the perspective you’ve added with your rewrites. These examples are just that–examples meant to spur on engagement that can create better ones. I encourage everyone to chime in with their rewritten versions of some of my “modified versions.”

Especially if you can rewrite some of the sentences while using at least one type of the modifiers mentioned–resumptive, summative, or free–it’d be interesting to see who can come up with the closest-to-perfection version by using a modifier.

@Rick

You’re welcome. Yes, keeping it simple is necessary, but keeping it interesting is too. Glad you enjoyed the post.

I’m a big fan of the techniques you demonstrated, having once been deemed “The Queen of the Run-On Sentence,” a title I have consistently earned since 1986, a fine year unless you’re a fan of Billy Buckner.

To wit:

Original: He finally faced his biggest fear that had plagued him since he joined the team. This gave him newfound confidence and enabled him to take top honors.

New:
One fear had plagued him since he joined the team, causing innumerable moments of indecision, crippling his ability to be the hero that his town needed. Having conquered that fear, Billy’s confidence soared, rising to enable him to take top honors; honors which were dashed for good, when indecision and Mookie Wilson caught up with him at last.

Original: The restaurant serves excellent sushi and provides flavor you can’t get anywhere else. It makes you want to come back for more.

New:
Freshest fish daily. F—ing fabulous flavor. 😉

Wordy works wonders, though sometimes simple suffices.

Oh, me.

Thanks for the technical terminology; I haven’t thought about sentence structure seriously in years.